Return … faithless … faithlessness all come from the same stem in Hebrew, indicating the continuing play on words; see verses 6 and 20. Here one way to keep the relation between the words is “Come back faithfully to me, you unfaithful people, and I will restore you to being faithful.”

It may be impossible in some languages to speak of healing faithlessness. Thus Good News Translation translates “he will heal you and make you faithful.” Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch expresses the same thought somewhat differently: “But the Lord says, ‘… I will put everything right between us once again!’ ”

Behold …: Here it is the people who are speaking. Revised Standard Version shows this simply with quotation marks, but Good News Translation makes the break clear by ending the poetry after the second line of the verse and beginning a prose paragraph with the third line. Revised English Bible continues the poetry, but has a break between the first and second half of the verse. Whatever translators do, they may find it helpful to have “The people say” or “You say” at the beginning of this line.

Behold, we come to thee; for thou art the LORD our God appears in Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch as “Yes, Lord, we return to you, since you are our God.” Good News Translation, which uses a third person reference to God in verses 23-25, has “Yes, we are coming to the LORD because he is our God.” For Behold see 1.6.

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Jeremiah. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2003. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .